#BTColumn – Charting the USA’s political decline

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY. 

by David A. Cox

Last week’s announcement that the United States (US) Supreme Court had decided after nearly fifty years to overturn Roe v. Wade, signals that America has finally begun its inevitable, inexorable decline, into disaster.

Why? Because the decision by the majority of justices to overturn Roe, signals that the US Supreme Court, has finally become deranged.

With this derangement, governing in America will become increasingly unbalanced and unhinged, until the country is
no longer able to function as a viable democracy, capable of solving the great and consequential problems with which
it is confronted.

To understand this admittedly alarming claim, it is important to understand what has actually happened, and what the decision means.

A quick review of the history of the Court and of the implications of the decision, suggests that what it actually means, is quite alarming. It means that four sitting justices on the Court: Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney-Barret, did a disservice to the US Senate, no less, about their willingness to respect Roe as settled law in America.

Tragically, it means Chief Justice John Roberts has lost control of the Court, and will go down in history as probably the most impotent Chief Justice the Court has ever had.

But more worrying, the decision also means that the Supreme Court of the United States has become stridently ideological. Make no mistake. Put aside, for the moment, any personal feelings about abortion you may have. Last week’s decision represents a massive political earthquake with astounding consequences for America.

What occurred was nothing short of a carefully orchestrated, years-in-the-making, judicial rebellion. It was instigated by a determined, activist, religious cabal, of runaway justices.

Its consequence, is that the US Supreme Court has become seized by an activist judicial theocracy, bent on imposing its theological and moral values on the majority of Americans, in flagrant defiance of their basic democratic desires.

The significance of this, cannot be overstated. In years past, the Supreme Court could have, more or less, been relied upon to be the one institution in America to eschew ideology, in favour of a moderate, incremental, and measured approach to law-making. Last week’s decision means that it has completely abandoned this traditional role.

The implications are terrifying. In the past, when America made its greatest strides in human rights, it was the US Supreme Court which led its moral and ethical transformation.

In practically every sphere that we can think of; whether in civil and voting rights for blacks, equal rights for women in the workplace, the separation between Church and State, protection of free speech, health care or same-sex unions, the Supreme Court has served as a vigilant and reliable check and balance against Presidential ineffectiveness and congressional excesses.

In the process, the Court has also served as the conscience of America and an important symbol to the entire world on the importance of human rights. This role, as an important check and balance on abuses of power, and as the final arbiter of the meaning of an old constitution in a modern world, has been critical in shaping America as a functional, effective democracy.

For more context, it is important to understand that the US, as important as it is as a country, has always been far more important as a concept. The scope of this concept was perhaps most famously and eloquently expressed by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg address, where he expressed the hope that the grand experiment of “government of the people, by the people, for the people…” would not “perish from the earth.”

Writing in the anguish of the civil war and in the aftermath of its bloodiest battle, Lincoln was making an argument that America was more than merely a country, because in Lincoln’s mind, America was synonymous with democracy. He was saying that the preservation of America, and specifically the union, was about more than mere lines on a map or territorial integrity.

He believed that saving America was about proving to the world that democracy could succeed as a new form of government. For Lincoln, America represented the clearest affirmation that popular democracy, as a system of government, was the highest expression of human values, and the country would always be, democracy’s best exemplar.

But Lincoln also made a prophetic statement about America, which the Supreme Court decision is proving true, today. Writing sometime in the mid-1800s, he had asserted that America could never be conquered from the outside by any foreign power.

Rather, he thought, America’s undoing would be an act of suicide. As of last week, the five justices who voted to overturn Roe, effectively signalled that the US was at long last, firmly fixed on the path to committing suicide.

I am aware this is an extraordinary claim. But a cursory review of American history reveals it to be well founded. Throughout its history, the US has from time to time lurched to extremes that could have proved its undoing. What has been remarkable about the American story however, is that at each inflection point when it was poised to destroy itself, because one of its branches of government had become deranged, one of the other branches, always managed to pull it back from the brink.

In the 1860s when the US was seized by civil war, it was saved by the Presidency, in the person of Abraham Lincoln. In the 1960s, during the civil rights era, where America seemed poised to descend into racist depravity and human rights abominations, the country was rescued, first by the Supreme Court, in Brown vs. Board of Education, and then later by the Presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson, until eventually, Congress followed. Then, when in the 1970s, the very presidency became deranged because of Richard Nixon’s outrageous conduct in the Watergate affair, it was the American Congress that stepped in, and ultimately saved the country.

Of course, it is true that Republican efforts to impeach Nixon, were first and foremost about ensuring political accountability. But Watergate was also important for demonstrating to the world, and in particular to developing countries and dictators everywhere, that America’s fidelity to the rule of law and to democratic precepts, trumped political expedience and ideological factions.

In fact, the entire history of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, is the story of a country riven with divisions, which were often overcome by a set of unifying values and a commitment to an ideal about American identity and America’s place in the world.

In the past, the things about which Americans agreed, could always be relied upon to help them overcome the things about which they disagreed. Those unifying values have always been exemplified in institutions, and particularly, the country’s main branches of government, in the form of the Presidency, the Congress, and the country’s highest court. On occasions when any one or more of these institutions became deranged, the other remaining branches would step in to save the country, and by extension, the very idea of America itself.

In other words, American democracy has always rested on a tripod of institutions, which until last week, stood with such firmness and resilience that, at any one point in time when the country seemed poised to tip over into anarchy and abandon its democratic ethos, one or two of the other legs, managed to keep the country upright.

Tragically, we are now at a point in American history when, all three major branches of government are deranged, and with their derangement, America’s inexorable slide into irrelevance and division is guaranteed. The US Supreme Court was the last moderate institution left, capable of supporting American democracy, and forestalling its slide into anarchy. With the fall of the Court there are no branches left
to save the whole.

This will strike some as hyperbolic. But the facts are clear and evident for all who are willing to see them. Paralyzed by archaic rules and hyper-partisan warfare, the US Congress had been sliding into derangement for years, until at last, it reached a nadir during the Obama presidency, from which it never recovered. The US Presidency has been irreparably broken and deranged by the Trump presidency, and despite the damning testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson this week, it appears poised to return to debauchery in 2024. There is no hope for a restorative Presidential balm for America.

The last institution standing, the Supreme Court, which, up to the point of overturning Roe, represented the last bastion of moderate, deliberate, apolitical approaches (for the most part) to problem solving on a national scale, has now pivoted away from moderation, to extremism, and will remain on this ideological, theological, right-wing course, for untold years to come. It has abandoned judicial discipline in favour of political ideology. It has sacrificed centrist principles and popular legitimacy, to embrace an extremist, activist agenda.

But it is not only what the Court has done, which is so disturbing. It is also the matter of how they did it.

Consider for a moment, the pulverising realisation that four of the justices involved were so committed to overturning Roe, that, as I interpret it, they essentially perjured themselves to have the opportunity to do it.

Already, all signs point to the fact that Roe is only the beginning. Other rights and protections are at risk, and will likely go the way of Roe. In the new America, compromises will be anathema. Big problems will be impossible to solve. American laws and values will become sharply conservative, while the majority of its populace, remains steadfastly centrist.

In short, the activism of the Court will cause a terrible divorce between American jurisprudence and American mainstream values, effectively pulling average Americans into entrenched camps, unable to resolve their differences through compromise of any kind. The decision to overturn Roe, signals that Americans no longer have any institutions left, to remind them that there are more things that unite them than divide. All US government branches now, are about taking sides, their fellow Americans, be damned.

All three American branches of government are now obsessively focused, on imposing one side’s values, on those with whom they disagree. Tyranny abounds.

Such is the way to anarchy. And to be sure, it would be foolish to presume that the US will collapse overnight, or that its power and influence will wane within a matter of a mere few years. But it is not hyperbolic at all to say that America could literally be, just one hyper-partisan election official away, from collapse into despotism.

By overturning Roe therefore; by ignoring the long established legal principle of binding precedent, by conspiring to impose a set of pseudo-religious values on the majority of the American public which it does not want, the Court has not merely veered wildly to the right. It has careened madly on a high, winding road. It has launched America over the edge of a sheer cliff. It has plunged the country down a steep, unforgiving, precipice, with nothing below but the jagged rocks and unyielding stone, of ruin and destruction,
to break the fall.

None of us should have any illusions that it will emerge from the wreckage, intact and unscathed.

David A. Cox is a Saint Lucia-based attorney with a Master’s Degree in International Economic Law and was a member of St. Lucia’s Constitutional Reform Commission which published its final report in 2011. He has published several articles on constitutional reform. Questions and follow-ups on this article may be sent to danthony_cox@yahoo.com